Sometimes people ask me what my desktop system looks like. I use the
X Window System.

The X Window System supports bit mapped displays with multiple color
depths, from black-and white to the millions of colors shown here.
It supports overlapping windows, multiple fonts, keyboards, pointing
devices such as "mice" and "trackballs".

With a sufficiently powerful display adapter, you can also run popular
games such as "World of Warcraft" by Blizzard Entertainment.

Okay, that's enough of that. Please forgive the self-indulgent
nostalgia and inside humor — I hope some of you enjoyed it.

To those of you who have no idea what I'm on about: when I was younger, I
was really interested in different operating systems and desktop
environments, and read a great deal about them. At the time I was
doing this (circa 2000) I was already using a Linux machine, and therefore
X windows. It was a pretty reasonable (if somewhat rough and DIY)
desktop environment at the time, but every time i ran across some online
publication talking about it, the included picture was some hilariously
improbable shot showing TWM, XBiff, XClock, and XLogo. Inevitably
there would inexplicably be an XEyes window as well. Who
would actually run a program that did nothing but display a
logo? Wouldn't a pair of googly eyes following your mouse
around be distracting? Why would you run TWM when you could run WindowMaker? To go with this
improbable screenshot, there was typically a retro blurb explaining that
it supported "bit-mapped graphics" and "multiple colors".

These descriptions were written at a time when such things were taken for
granted (and not written up in contemporary descriptions of, for example,
the BeOS desktop environment). I suppose the authors were somewhat
lazily copying from ancient marketing copy, unable to make sense of the
bizarre constellation of window managers and desktop environments
surrounding X itself.

Unlike other
other systems which throw their history down the memory hole, every
major Linux distribution still ships with a recent, up-to-date copy of
these archiaic tools. So, every once in a while, I choose "TWM" from
the "sessions" menu in GDM
and have a chuckle. Once cedega allowed me to replace the
traditional "xdémineur" with WoW, I realized this screenshot was just
begging to be taken. If you're curious what my desktop
actually looks like, here's me switching between windows while
writing this article: